Two Experts on the Resurrection

KEVIN HARRIS: A blogger who goes by Andrew has gotten my attention. He writes prolifically on his deconstruction of his Christian faith. By the way, “deconstruction” these days means everything from making doctrinal adjustments to your theology to outright rejection of Christian theism. For Andrew, it seems to be the latter. Let me just ask you, Bill, deconstruction is not a new word but it is kind of a new term. We've got all these people who are saying they're deconstructing their faith. And it's all over the map. It doesn't mean one thing. Have you been hearing this at all?

DR. CRAIG: Yes. I think it's a motif of postmodernism that you deconstruct or disassemble the traditional structures and values and ways of thinking and replace it. It's so ironic for me because, immersed as I am in doing this systematic philosophical theology at present, I am engaged in the task of theological construction. That's my interest. I don't want to deconstruct things. I want to construct a positive, coherent account of the world from a Christian point of view.

KEVIN HARRIS: In this blog^[1], he claims that two prominent experts on the resurrection of Jesus – Mike Licona and Dale Allison – admit that there is not good evidence for the event. I know you've shared the platform with Mike, but what about Dale Allison? What can you tell us about him?

DR. CRAIG: He is a very prominent New Testament scholar of considerable repute. He wrote a long essay several years ago called “Resurrecting Jesus” that I thought was the most formidable critique of the evidence for the resurrection that I've ever read. I was really shocked. And yet, at the end of this critique, Allison came out in support of the historicity of Jesus’ resurrection from the dead. The fact that after such a severe and critical weighing of the evidence that he would come to affirm the historicity of Jesus’ resurrection was very impressive. I actually participated in an exchange of views with him that was published in the journal Philosophia Christi of the Evangelical Philosophical Society. So it's been good to interact with Professor Allison, and I'll be including that article as an appendix in the new edition of my book Assessing the New Testament Evidence for the Historicity of the Resurrection of Jesus, which is going to be reprinted by Wipf and Stock this year.

KEVIN HARRIS: Very good. Again, Andrew has embraced atheism, and his conclusions come from an interview with Drs. Licona and Allison on Sean McDowell's podcast. Andrew writes,

The majority of Christians are not scholars. We should not expect them to be anyway. Apart from their own experience, their knowledge about their religion usually comes from their pastors, who learned it from their professors in the seminary or other Bible scholars.

Therefore, when lay Christians say there is strong evidence for Jesus’ resurrection, what they usually mean is that they trust Christian scholars who do research on Jesus’ resurrection.

Fair enough. But hasn't God gifted the church with scholars down through the ages?

DR. CRAIG: Oh, of course. There are teachers in the church who represent the sort of intellectual side of the faith to whom we can turn for help on these difficult questions. And this is the case not just in theology but in every area. Think of medicine. Think of science, for example. Think of history. None of us has the ability to investigate firsthand all of these matters. So what we largely believe will be what we trust reliable authorities say about these matters. And it's true in theology as well as in history or science or medicine or engineering.

KEVIN HARRIS: Andrew then writes,

For this reason, it is important for Christians to know that two leading resurrection scholars, both profess to be Christians, actually admit there is no compelling evidence for Jesus’ resurrection.

He cites this clip from Allison talking about possible embellishments in the accounts as his first example. Clip number one.

DR. ALLISON: So if I look at Mark, I think Mark is the earliest and not only is it the earliest but it’s the least apologetically helpful. That is, if I look at Matthew, he’s got a guard at the tomb and he’s also got Jesus somehow rising before the stone is removed, and then if you go to John and to Luke, then you get some men who show up also to confirm what happened to the women. You also have some burial clothes to the side, which is very odd if that's theft. So as I read the Gospels, I look at the story in Mark as the earliest and as the least apologetically helpful. For me, that's another indication that we have some memory. Christians are looking at it and thinking, “Oh, we have to say some more things here because this story – this bare-boned story – just by itself is more ambiguous than we would like it to be.”

KEVIN HARRIS: Then Andrew cites this clip from Michael Licona to prove that Mike agrees with Dale Allison. Clip number two.

DR. LICONA: In terms of embellishments or apologetic stuff being in Matthew, Luke, and John, I mean it’s possible. Dale has done a lot more work in this area than I have. Historians can only go so far, and when I look at the resurrection of Jesus and study it, I’m only looking at those things . . . I’m not trying to get down deep into and dig real, real deep in the dirt to try to sift through a lot of stuff. I’m trying to see what are the bare-bone facts that we can look at that are really, really strongly supported by the data. And then what’s the best explanation for those facts? So I don’t rule out what Dale just said. It could have some of that in there, but like Dale said, it really doesn’t change anything in terms of an empty tomb. The tomb, if it were empty, you could still have a story that you have details embroidered into it to make it more flowery.

KEVIN HARRIS: Is Andrew making a hard-hitting point against the resurrection with these two clips?

DR. CRAIG: Well, I didn't hear either Allison or Licona say that we have no compelling evidence for the resurrection of Jesus. Andrew is reading something into them that I think he already believes and wants to hear from them. Allison's point was actually an argument in favor of the historicity of the Markanaccount of the discovery of the empty tomb – a point that I have made in my own work on the resurrection of Jesus; namely, that the Markanaccount is remarkably simple. It is uncolored by apologetical motifs or theological reflection or christological titles ascribed to Jesus. It is really stark in its simplicity, and that gives historians much greater confidence in the historicity of the Markan narrative of the women's discovery of the empty tomb. I think maybe Andrew has just misunderstood Allison when he talks about the later accounts having more apologetical value. What Allison doesn't mean is that the later accounts are better. He's saying that the earlier Markanaccount is the most primitive and unembellished and trustworthy and therefore we can confidently believe what it asserts about the women discovering Jesus’ tomb empty on the first day of the week. That's enormous. That's an incredible conclusion, and it is a conclusion to which the wide majority of New Testament scholars have come today. As for Licona, it's evident I think in Mike's comments that what he's talking about is the so-called minimal facts approach that he shares with Gary Habemas. Namely, he doesn't bother with all of these secondary details of the narratives. Rather he focuses on what are those minimal facts that the consensus of scholarship agrees on, and then argues that Jesus’ resurrection is the best explanation of those facts.Now, that's not my approach. Like Dale Allison, in my published work I get down and get dirty with the details of the narratives and attempt to sort these out. But Andrew has really misunderstood these fellows when he imputes this opinion to them. I think what you've got going on here is you've got an unbeliever who is incapable himself of refuting the evidence for the historicity of Jesus' resurrection, and so he is desperate to find what look like concessionary statements on the part of the proponents of that evidence. I think he's misconstrued the statements that Allison and Licona made.

KEVIN HARRIS: By the way, Andrew writes, “It is apparent by now that neither Allison nor Licona believes in the inerrancy of the Bible.” First of all, that's not that apparent. And I suppose that that would depend on how they would define inerrancy and how they would frame that doctrine. There's not just one way.

DR. CRAIG: Sure. Allison probably doesn't believe in biblical inerrancy. He is not an evangelical, as I say. He's very skeptical, which makes his advocacy of the historicity of the resurrection all the more impressive. In terms of Licona, Michael and I have discussed at some length the doctrines of inspiration and inerrancy. I think Licona's view would be that the Bible is truthful and authoritative in all that it teaches, but he would say there are things in the narratives that are not part of the teaching of Scripture and therefore not authoritative for us today. But you noticed how cautious he was in dealing with Allison here. He didn't agree with him. He just said that's possibly the case. It could be the case, but it doesn't matter because he's basing his argument upon these minimal facts.

KEVIN HARRIS: Nevertheless, while Andrew says that Christians could just appeal to an inerrancy to overcome embellishment accusations he says these next clips are more fatal to the resurrection. He claims that Allison says skeptics have good reasons to not believe in the resurrection. In this next clip, clip number three, Sean asks a question about historical methodology.

SEAN MCDOWELL: One of the things that I think is at play here in some of our disagreements is the difference in methodology. I'd love to hear you spell out a little bit of . . . you both have described yourselves as Christians. You're looking at this historically but seem to differ in terms of how you approach these questions. Why don't we start with Dale. How would you describe your historical approach in looking at questions like the resurrection?

DALE ALLISON: Well, my frivolous answer is that I'm more sympathetic to the atheist. So I’m always asking: What does somebody who [does] not agree with me think? I have a problem here because at the end of the day I say God raised Jesus from the dead. All right, so I'm in the Christian camp. It's just that I think it's harder to get there with purely historical reasoning.

KEVIN HARRIS: Andrew's conclusion to this is,

Allison admits that the resurrection hypothesis is just as improbable, if not more improbable, than the theft hypothesis. The bare facts that historians could establish do not strongly favor either position. So Christians cannot really say that skeptics are biased against the resurrection.

The question for Christians, therefore, is: Why would you believe in an interpretation that requires supernatural intervention when there is another one that does not require it?

DR. CRAIG: Clearly the answer to that last question is because of the superior explanatory power of the resurrection hypothesis. It better explains the evidence. It explains more scope of the data. It is less ad hoc. It is plausible. It accords with accepted beliefs, especially if those accepted beliefs include theism. In my argument for the resurrection, it is always an argument that follows upon the arguments of natural theology for a creator and designer of the universe so that theism is already in place when you come to the evidence for the resurrection. Now, I haven't seen this whole dialogue but, for goodness sake, nothing that Allison said in that clip you played says that the resurrection hypothesis is improbable or more improbable than the theft hypothesis. On the contrary, what Allison says – and this is what makes his argument so impressive – is that he comes to this very sympathetic to the skeptic. He himself is very skeptical when he approaches this evidence, and yet he is convinced in spite of it that the resurrection hypothesis is the most probable explanation of the evidence. So Andrew ought to really resonate with Dale Allison because Allison approaches it as a skeptic, too, and yet feels compelled by the force of the evidence to say that Jesus rose from the dead. So, again, Andrew seems to be reading things into these gentlemen’s statements that they themselves do not say or believe.

KEVIN HARRIS: Andrew's final point is, “If there is comparable evidence in other religions, these scholars would hesitate to believe in them.” He uses this clip from Mike to make his point. Clip number four.

DR. LICONA: I've struggled and tried to think as the skeptic when I was doing my heavy research on this. My doctoral supervisor, Jan van der Watt, whom Dale knows, he and Gary Habermas, and William Lane Craig, and my wife could all tell how viciously I wrestled with this stuff in bracketing my worldview and trying to be as objective with this as possible. I still do that. I mean, today sometimes people say, “What do you think is the toughest objection to the resurrection?” I don't think most of what's offered out there is that tough. But if I . . . when I look at it, I think, well if I were a Muslim, and let’s just say that the evidence we had for Islam being correct was on par for what we have for the resurrection, and that we did not have that evidence for the resurrection. So if you just kind of flip-flopped and they had the evidence for the truth of Islam that we have for Christianity, but we didn’t have what we have, would that be enough to persuade me as a Christian to become a Muslim? And I honestly don’t know that’s the case because I don’t like Islam. It’s not attractive in the least to me. Would that amount of evidence be enough to pull me over? I don't know that it would be.

KEVIN HARRIS: Andrew concludes from this,

Do you see that? When faced with intriguing but seemingly compelling evidence of non-Christian miracles, they just throw their hands up and say, “I don’t know” or “I have no idea”. But when it comes to Christianity, they actually make a living out of defending its reliability.

Quite an accusation there. It sounds to me like Mike was just trying to be honest.

DR. CRAIG: As Mike mentioned in that clip, I know what he went through in working through this material. He honestly wrestled with it, agonized with it, and sought to be as objective as he could. Mike Licona is one of the most transparent and vulnerable people that I know, someone without pretenses. He's just being really honest here. When he was working on this I actually disagreed with him about this. I said, “Mike, do not bracket your worldview. You should not do that. That's wrong. We have good grounds for believing that God exists, and we should approach the evidence with that in hand and not try to pretend that we don't know what, in fact, we do know.” I was worried for him, that he was bracketing too much. But the key here, I think, to understanding this is to appreciate what classical defenders of miracles had to say when it came to claims to counterfeit miracles. What they said is that you must always weigh the context – the religio-historical context – in which the alleged miracle occurs in order to assess whether it's genuine of God or whether it's a counterfeit miracle (either fake or demonic). That would include the doctrinal and moral context. Any purported miracle in favor of a doctrine that is inherently immoral or unethical cannot be a genuine miracle. That's the tip-off to when Michael Licona says, “I don't like Islam.” What he's talking about is that this religion, as I've argued, has a morally defective concept of God – a God who is not all-loving, whose love is partial, whose love has to be earned and merited before he will give it, a God whose love is not unconditional. So I think that the God of Islam or the religion of Islam is inherently morally defective and therefore no amount of miraculous evidence could go to prove it's true. This is in contrast to the teachings and ministry of Jesus of Nazareth which are admired ethically universally, and are tremendously attractive to anyone who reads about the life and the teachings of Jesus. I think when you understand this in its proper context you can see why Mike would have the hesitation that he does.

KEVIN HARRIS: As we conclude today, I don't know Andrew's full story. But I get the same impression that you got, but I also get the impression that he would not be writing this blog, nor in fact, would he have gone through such a severe deconstruction of his faith had he not encountered perhaps exaggerated apologetic claims and been thrown by them. I wonder what he thinks historical apologetics is supposed to accomplish? His conclusion to the entire blog is: If two prominent Christian scholars admit that there are limitations to the historical evidence for the resurrection and admit they became Christians at an early age because they were raised to do so, where does that leave the average non-scholar Christian – the Christian layman?

Bill?

DR. CRAIG: Where that leaves him is with tremendous confidence that these two prominent scholars, despite their initial skepticism, believe that the evidence supports the historicity of Jesus’ resurrection. Of course there are limitations to historical evidence! Here, as you say, perhaps Andrew has faced exaggerated apologetical claims like there's more evidence for the resurrection of Jesus than that Julius Caesar ever existed or some such exaggerated claim. But that's not what scholars like Dale Allison or Richard Swinburne or Steve Davis or I suggest. We say that, in Davis' case, it's rational in light of the evidence to believe in Jesus’ resurrection. Or, in my case, that it's the best explanation and a good explanation of the evidence and therefore more probable than not, and therefore we ought to believe in the resurrection. So the average Christian who is not himself a scholar can take great encouragement and confidence from that. And as for becoming Christians at an early age, I would say that that shows that there is an avenue to the knowledge of the risen Lord that is not dependent upon historical research or historical scholarship, and that the vast majority of Christians who have come to believe in Jesus’ resurrection have taken this avenue (namely, the avenue of a personal living encounter with the risen Lord himself). You don't need to be a historical scholar in order to have a personal relationship with the living risen Lord. The fact that these scholars have such a relationship with God is, again, something that is wonderful and something that every Christian can rejoice in.

KEVIN HARRIS: I want to remind you that you can give to Reasonable Faith and keep this work going forward all around the world. We get questions and interactions from people in Muslim countries, in Europe and Asia, South America. All over the world people are interacting with Reasonable Faith, and you can partner with us prayerfully and financially. Any gift that you give is so appreciated and such a blessing. Go to ReasonableFaith.org; you can give online there. And tap into the many resources Reasonable Faith has just for you. ReasonableFaith.org.^[2]